The Great Western Jobs Program

Industrially-necessary everything

A joke that quickly gets old is when people say they’re “going to the office to move numbers around in spreadsheets.” It’s said as a joke, but that really is what some people do for a living. Which is why it’s said with cynicism and maybe a touch of self-hatred.

Because that’s not a living. It certainly doesn't feel like one.

To borrow a phrase from Ben Hunt, it seems so many things in our lives have become “industrially necessary” while also being minimally useful. Or even un-useful. Anti-useful.

At my last job, there was an entire department whose daily work consisted of taking information that existed in a place and putting it in a different place. Punching numbers. In 2020, punching numbers. Feels like we’re a little old for that. And then there was a segment of that department that would make phone calls and send emails about those numbers with clients, record when those phone calls and emails took place, do follow-ups, and then report to their bosses on those numbers and phone calls and follow-ups.

To get people to pay bills, and to punch numbers from one website into another website. We called that the finance department. And they used a smorgasbord of complicated software and apps, for their finance work, built by numerous other companies with finance departments of their own. And of course none of this software communicated with any of the other software, so it was all manual labor.

We have made an entire industry out of getting companies to pay their bills. And out of recording the paying or non-paying of those bills in 4 different locations on the internet plus an in-house spreadsheet.

Half of that problem could be solved by paying someone $2,000 to write an Application Programming Interface and never having to punch numbers again. Ever.

I’m not judging or belittling anyone’s jobs here. I’ve had these jobs before too. And in any case, having a job and earning money for oneself and one’s family is sexy.

Furthermore, not all clerical work is created equal — for instance, part of being a good nurse has always been taking excellent notes. Part of starting a company is keeping track of so many details and numbers that it makes you want to puke.

I’m just talking about what jobs in general have become. What our economy of jobs is like now.

Ben, in the above essay, talks about how the academic process — the very concept of writing papers, and the pursuit of knowledge itself — has become an industrially-necessary evil driven more by mechanics than by utility or merit. Our economy depends on people continuing to write dissertations, and that includes dissertations that add little or no value to anything academic. And certainly not to the real world.

Ben even argues that, despite recent plagiarism scandals, the system requires certain evils to hold itself together. People don’t just plagiarize sometimes when they lack scruples… they have to. People don’t just haphazardly produce jargon-y nonsense that means nothing to anybody… they have to. Because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any dissertations to write.

There aren’t enough actual discoveries to go around for all the people who want graduate degrees in the sciences, and there isn’t enough time for those people to spend both researching and then re-wording the thousands of ideas that have to go into every dissertation. Or every psychology study, or anything else academic.

There are only so many ways you can word a commonly-accepted scientific principle, only so many ways you can word the introduction to an idea. People have to re-use (or steal) words, phrases, and ideas from others just to get the stupid paper written, and to make it long and complex enough to be arbitrarily impressive.

The system works the way it does because it’s overcrowded and broken. It’s like hosting a party every year for 400 people in a 300 square-foot bar. People want a party, and we want to charge them for tickets, so we keep doing it… despite the yearly complaints of elbowing and bruised ribs.

The industry of academia requires people to do sub-par work, to cut corners, and to pad their papers with useless nonsense. Otherwise very few people in academia would have jobs, and the industry would collapse.

The intellectual rot of the university, Ben argues, is (at least partially) due to this anti-useful system and its impact on the way people do knowledge work.

And the more I’ve thought about this lately, the more I realize it’s not just academia. It’s everything.

We pay people to go around making messes, and then we pay people to go clean those messes up. We hire employees to put numbers into random internet applications because we don’t have anything else for them to do. We pay experts to review dissertations full of science-y jargon that no person should ever have to read, because we need something for them to do with their expertise other than sit around being experts.

We simply don't have enough useful jobs to go around. These things are industrially necessary because they keep us all from being unemployed.

I heard someone say recently that airport security, a miserable experience for the customer, doesn’t even seem to accomplish much... that it's a thinly-disguised jobs program.

And I think that's right. Especially since the strictness of the security changes depending on the day and the airport. I’ve gone through LaGuardia and been damn near strip-searched by an angry TSA Nazi, and other times I’ve gone through LaGuardia and didn’t even have to unpack my laptop or take my shoes off. They just waved me through, daydreaming.

Any system that can afford to be that inconsistent probably isn’t doing what it claims to be doing. It’s probably just there to keep people busy.

And in this light-hearted essay, Adam Mastroianni makes some similar points about the realm of statistics. Using statistics in the social sciences is like driving a lifted pickup truck with halogen lights: it’s only useful to the person using it. To everyone else, it’s usually just dangerous. Statistics give us something to do, but usually don’t produce a whole lot of utility (or merit).

If we were to cut out all of the non-“essential” workers in our economy, the way we did during the early days of COVID, how many jobs would we be cutting? 8% of our workforce? 20%? 60%? Elon Musk took over Twitter and cut 80% of employees and Twitter kept running.

Obviously he overdid it, because he overdoes literally everything, but he made it clear that Twitter was bloated and gassy. So are most companies.

If we all got rid of bloat, maybe we could finally get that automated economy that J. M. Keynes foresaw last century. Keynes predicted that by now we'd have a robot economy where we all work part time and spend the rest of our time picnicking. Where we finally get to step off the gas and enjoy the fruits of an economy that has “made it.”

Because we have made it.

We’re post-industrial. Industry has come and, in some sense, gone. At least in the developed West. Industry came and got filled with humans, those humans got faster and more efficient until they were replaced by robots and algorithms, and just like that we’re no longer primarily industrial. It only took a couple hundred years for us to get through the industrial age.

Think about that for a moment. Homo sapiens, after hundreds of thousands of years of toil and survival and danger and misery, spent about 200 years engaged in heavy industry before we were like “well that was successful, now let’s sit around eating sandwiches and talk about all the things we know and think.”

We went from “ancient times” of struggle and disease to a safe economy based mostly around knowledge, services, and information, in 200 years. From serfs to philosophers. That’s like hiccupping and gaining 90 pounds of pure muscle. And our civilization still has not learned how to deal with such a sudden change.

I heard a story one time about a professor. He said that in college, he studied Egyptology. He couldn't wait to start his career focused around the history and culture of Egypt.

But when it came time to find a job, he found that Egyptologist isn't a real job. So he became a professor of Egyptology and made a pyramid scheme joke.

There are pyramid schemes everywhere. The creator economy, maybe the knowledge economy as a whole, tends to work this way.

You see people on social media selling courses on how to make money on social media. But what are they really teaching? They're teaching other people how to make money selling courses on how to make money on social media.

Or they're making videos on how to make money in real estate, so that their students can go teach other people how to make money in real estate. Meanwhile nobody actually makes any fucking money in real estate, because it’s hard and almost no one who makes those videos can actually do it. At least not without a 700,000-dollar head start.

Our creator economy is an ironic self-referential joke where the only thing we're accomplishing is spending and making money. Passing around ideas that few people are even competent enough to use.

You also see this work-for-work’s-sake phenomenon in things like the peer review system, where scientists spend 15,000 years per year pre-emptively reviewing science articles that could instead just be published and evaluated based on their long-term merits. You know, the way science used to be done. When we discovered quantum mechanics and almost everything else we've ever discovered.

Or in the creation and maintenance of various government agencies, bureaus, and committees whose only jobs are to gather information, discuss that information, make decisions that aren't useful to anybody, and then ask for a bigger share of the fiscal budget next year so they can keep hiring.

A jobs program can be thought of as an economic project whose primary purpose is to employ people. To keep money flowing when there aren't enough jobs to feed everyone. Whatever output comes from the program’s work is incidental.

It feels like everything is a jobs program. Other than small companies, who are working extremely hard so that one day they can become jobs programs.

Here’s another example: When's the last time you read the terms and conditions? Of anything?

Literally never, is the correct answer. Because no one does.

When's the last time you read through an entire legal contract? They're unreadable; they're meant to be unreadable. For a few reasons:

• To employ lawyers to prepare them,

• To employ lawyers to read them, and

• To employ support teams for the lawyers doing the reading and preparing.

There are so many rules in contract law, so many rules in various systems, that they aren't even useful. Because no one even has time to understand them all. If you get pulled over and the officer asks what you were doing wrong, you should just be honest and say “I don’t know, but probably something.”

In theory, contract law is a critical part of our legal system that keeps people from taking advantage of improperly-built relationships. In practice, the extent of contract law serves one main purpose: to create jobs in contract law.

There are bills that go through Congress that are 5,593 pages. That’s 4 Count of Monte Cristos, a Grapes of Wrath and a 30-page Belize travel pamphlet. Nobody’s reading that. Because it’s not a useful document. The length of those bills is just a tool for wasting time.

Institutions and societies bloat when there are too many people sitting around with nothing to do other than “something.” We’re bloated.

Now I'm not saying we should cut down our population (although I think mathematically that would solve 80% of our problems and return us to a state of being focused on what’s useful). What I am wondering is why Keynes wasn’t right. We have reached a point where, for all intents and purposes, we should only be working 15 hours a week. There really isn’t a reason for that not to be true.

We don’t need a great Western jobs program anymore, we just need to stop doing things that don’t matter.

Henry Ford instituted the 40-hour workweek because 14-hour days were a relic of harder and less productive times. I think the 40-hour workweek is now the same kind of relic.

80% of the work done by 20% of our workforce could be eliminated with APIs. Not AI — not artificial intelligence — but APIs. Simple programs that scrape and organize data from the internet. Extremely simple programs to write.

The saddest part of all of this is that a lot of the people who benefit from these jobs programs make more than the people doing useful work.

Plumbers are not millionaires. Nor are the people who painstakingly measure pieces of lumber and stone for your house. Nor is the therapist who saved your daughter from suicide. Who are millionaires? People in knowledge economy pyramid schemes. People who sell social media courses. People who spend their time specializing in the exact definition of the word "transgress" in contract law.

People whose jobs are merely “industrially necessary.”

We really have made it. Our biggest problem is that we aren’t challenged enough in our day jobs. We’re a society that’s bored, because nothing is urgent anymore. Not even our jobs. Urgency makes things matter. Urgency makes us matter.

Our biggest challenge is that we have to find things that are meaningful, that are challenging. Life used to present those things to us by making us fight for everything we had. Now we have to go looking.

I don't know if there's anything to be done about all this. This bloat, all these spreadsheets, this academicization of everything. As I wrote before, I think as things get bigger they just tend to become less effective. I think that's a natural consequence of how enormous our system has become and how many people we have to provide for. And provide jobs for. How many bills need paid, how many families need fed.

But there are two upsides:

1. We are on the right side of a two-way door. We can choose to walk back through it for challenge and meaning, instead of settling for unrewarding things that seem necessary. And

2. Maybe one day we'll get that part-time economy that Keynes predicted for us. And maybe then we can spend a little less time on data and a little more time with our families and flowers and books.

Drink some water.

JDR

“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck?” - Internet meme